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Monday, November 26, 2012

NaNoWriMo: Final Thoughts

Okay, so last night's post came to you from a state of exhausted euphoria. For one thing, I was up way past my bedtime (I'm an early riser, and so I go to bed pretty early, too). For another, I'd been writing for about 16 straight hours. As much as I love writing (it's an every-fiber-of-my-being kind of love) it's hard work. I have to put all of myself into my writing (how else would it be any good?), and putting all of yourself into anything is exhausting. Especially since I've been doing it all month.

So, with a little more reserve than I used yesterday, I am happy to say that I am officially a NaNoWriMo 2012 winner! I verified the word count late last night, was given a choice of winner badges to add to my blog (it really is beautiful, isn't it?), received a lovely certificate that is already hanging over my desk at work, and was officially labeled a winner on the NaNoWriMo site:

It's a little blurry, but that pink box to the left of my picture says WINNER!

You see how it made a big spike there right at the end? I was on track to finish right on time, but the words pretty much exploded out of my fingertips yesterday. Then, when I was starting to get tired and thinking of calling it a night, I tweeted my word count. And people tweeted back, cheering me on. And I got a little rush of energy and kept right on writing. Then I hit another big word count landmark and tweeted that one. And got more tweets cheering me on. GO GO GO!!! So I went. Their encouragement made me eager to push myself that much harder. To make it happen five whole days ahead of schedule. So it was that I hit my 50,000 word NaNoWriMo goal on day 25. And immediately ordered my winner t-shirt because I want people to know. Granted, I doubt anyone but a fellow writer will even look twice at it, but it'll make me happy every time I put it on.

So here are some arbitrary NaNoWriMo stats. Just because I think stats are fun, so why not?

Number of days it took to finish: 25

Most words in a single day: 8,951 (and that's not just most in a NaNo day; that's most ever)

Least words in a single day: 0

Number of days I didn't write a single word: 9/25

Number of days where I wrote at least the target average of 1,667 words: 9/25

Longest stretch of consecutive days where I didn't write a single word: 4

Number of novels I read when I should've been writing: 3 (oops)

Likelihood that my longest stretch of consecutive days was a direct result of reading 3 novels: 100%

Now I just need to finish the book. But since I'm just getting started with the big, climactic part at the end, I think that'll happen sooner rather than later.